Archive for July 2013

A guy I’ve known on the streets off and on for several years came in for food. Under the rules he had already received his full quota of food parcels (each parcel equates to 3 days of worth of food). As we chatted, he told me he was at the end of his rope. This was literally true, as two days before he had climbed up a local hill and put a noose round his neck. For whatever reason, he hadn’t gone through with killing himself. The good news was that he was booked into a rehab unit in a week’s time.

I put the manager in the picture and we gave him a further 3 days worth of food. As he left I gave him an evangelistic booklet “The Missing Peace”. I hope he reads it. He’s a likeable guy, but keeps falling by the wayside in terms of drink and drugs. With Jesus there is always hope while you have breath in your body.

Two women came in later on. As they were chatting to each other, one explained that her 3 kids were by two different men. The other woman replied she had 4 kids by 3 different men. What complicated lives people lead!

A young guy aged 20 came in for food and in discussion told me he had a drink problem, having been hitting the bottle hard with horrible cheap stuff (“White Lightning”) for the last 5 years. He got alarmed when he started to get bleeding from his back passage, so has been to get help and is on tablets to curb the desire for alcohol. He was homeless and living in a tent until recently, but was now in acommodation. We chatted about faith and it became clear to me he wanted to turn his life around. I shared the gospel with him in some detail and he listened quite keenly.

He seemed to understand what I was saying as I illustrated the spiritual need for a change of direction. I shared a picture of how it’s like there are two buses, with different destinations. One is heading to Hell and Satan is the driver. Since the world is under Satan’s influence, we are in a sense all born on Satan’s bus. Satan is heading to Hell, since the Bible tells us that is the destination of Satan and all his fallen angels. Hell was not designed for people, but if we remain on Satan’s bus we end up at his destination. We therefore need to get off Satan’s bus and get on the one driven by Jesus – destination Heaven. I gave him a tract called “The Missing Peace” with my email address and website details as he was leaving.

Afterwards, an older guy came in looking for “the 3 ladies I shared some of my testimony with last week”. It was not our team, but I sat him down and listened to his story. He’d been in care for 10 years as a child, had a pretty rough life and ended up on the drink for many years. He finally got saved in a church in Brighton, England, and had drifted a bit recently. He clearly still had his faith, and occasionally attended church, but his spiritual life was pretty low according to how he described it. He also shared several temptations he had experienced. He had 3 bibles, so I encouraged him to read one every day and build himself up spiritually. I prayed with him before he left.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the German philosopher said: “The meaning of the world will not be found within the world”. This short video by Professor John Lennox of Oxford University will warm your heart if you are open to the benefits of a Christian faith. It also highlights the difficulties of atheism in relation to such things as justice and mercy.